There
were footsteps in the hall, sharp and clipping and growing steadily louder.
Jaysh jumped, backside numb against the
floor, knees tight and achy, jaw sore from vine. But despite his sudden start,
he found that his eyelids failed to open. Not because he was too weary to open
them, but because they’d never been
closed. Rather than a jump from sleep to wakefulness, Jaysh’s spasm of
movement had been a transition from numb complacency to a dizzying
self-awareness.
He turned to the door, listening to the
footfalls as they bore down upon him. Had he really sat here on this god-awful
floor all night? Had he really stared vacuously at the floorboards—acids in his
stomach churning and boiling and threatening to spill into his lap—for the
entire night?
The thin yellow line forming between the
shutters seemed to imply that he had. It looked a lot like the makings of
dawn’s glow and would go a long way towards explaining why someone was
venturing down the outer corridor in a direct route for his room.
Outside the threshold of his doorway, the
footsteps ceased.
“Young Jaysh?” a voice called, one
sounding remarkably like General Branmore. “Young Jaysh.” There came the soft
rap of arthritic knuckles against decorative trim, followed by, “Young Jaysh,
are you presentable?”
Jaysh considered telling him he was not,
but decided against such a ploy. Since he hadn’t locked the door—there was no
need, really, not when you had a giant crystal bodyguard ever at the ready—his deception
wouldn’t keep Serit out for long.
Thinking of his annoying diamond protector,
Jaysh glanced down at his lap, then around at the room, searching the dark
spaces beneath the dressing table and wardrobe. He hadn’t any possessions to
scatter—in his eagerness to escape the old king’s chamber, he had left them in
the anteroom—but it did look as though the kryst hadn’t lost its touch when it
came to frightening away his pet.
By high chest of drawers, pressed back
against the wall as far back as it could go, Jaysh’s shadow stood watching.
“Young Jaysh,” Serit called. “Are you
still in there?”
The woodsman did not answer. He was trying
to remember the door opening or closing last night, trying to recall the huge glittering
statue lumbering inside. He could not, as fate would have it—even with his eyes
staring glassily at the floor—but apparently it had happened. By some mystical,
unexplainable means, the sparkling brute had infiltrated the room, approached
his position on the floor, and frighten away his pet.
Jaysh knew he ought to be glaring at the
kryst, but he found he had no energy. He felt as empty and nerveless as he had the
previous night, probably the consequence of sitting on the floor and stared at
the planks.
From the entryway, the general rapped his
knuckles a second time and said, “Young Jaysh, are you decent?”
Jaysh didn’t know what dee-sent
meant, but it was clear that Serit wanted him to answer, so he lifted his chin
and invited the old man inside, initiating with his tongue a very long day of
nightmares and unpleasantries.
Jaysh didn’t realize this, of course, not
with the fluffy white seeds still wafting back and forth and distracting him
from his thoughts. He could hear the old man making sounds, could see his
lip-hair moving in time to the sounds, but they were still only sounds and didn’t
hold any meaning in his cluttered, fluttering body.
He kept waiting for Serit to take notice
of his vacuous stare, but the old man never did. Jaysh found that if he nodded
his head when the general paused between one series of sounds and the next, the
general went right on talking like everything was fine. For Jaysh, this proved to
be both beneficial and detrimental.
The benefit came as Jaysh managed to
conceal his state of fugue from the general and, thus, avoid a whole litany of
personal questions pertaining to his health. The detriment, however, came as
the cottony seeds of confusion interfered with the woodsman’s ability to
connect with his feelings. For example, as Serit explained the horrible scene
scheduled that afternoon, detailing both the old king’s interment and the new
king’s coronation, the woodsman’s hazy state of disassociation staved off his
horror. As had been the case last night, Jaysh experienced that same queer
sensation of knowing without feeling; the general’s words
painting pictures in his mind and Jaysh’s apathy dulling the affect that
ensued.
Consequently, it was not until much
later—well after the woodsman had been bathed and groomed and led up to the
Hill—that the first of these negative emotions broke through the wall of his indifference.
Looking back, he’d have to say it felt
like waking from a dream. He was standing on the Hill at the time—a wad of vine
in his cheek, the cat-thing in his arms (she’d been waiting on him beneath the
archway in the fence)—and the invisible scales of shock simply fell away from his
heart. One moment, he was very aware of the warm heaviness pulling him towards
the ground, and the next he was aware of nothing but his surroundings, as if
he’d been staring at a portrait of himself all day and, all of a sudden,
someone ripped it away and replaced it with a painting of his worst nightmare,
one in which the sun blazed bright, the sky shown blue, and the whole of Onador
was smashed inside the perimeter of the Hill.
There were people everywhere—Everywhere!—people,
people, and more people. Most standing among the tombs and
headstones—desecrating who knows how many gravesites with their bare and dirty
feet—but quite a few more were smashed against the outside of the Hill,
pressed against the fencing and packed around the arches, shoulder-to-shoulder
and practically stacked on top of one another. Men with their hats held at
their sides or clutched to their chests, women with their hankies out and
dabbing at their eyes or noses, members of both genders with enormous bulges in
their cheeks, all of them looking weary and numb and in need of some sleep.
Needless to say—based upon his proclivity
for the great outdoors and his abhorrence of civilization—Jaysh had never seen
such a gathering of people, and certainly not one so bleary-eyed and
downtrodden. Staring at it, he was reminded of what his dear old friend, Iman,
used to say when they happened upon someone so glum.
What’s wrong? the captain would ask, not a trace of
feeling in his tone. Someone run over your puppy? But insensitive or
not, that was exactly what Jaysh saw as he looked out from the center of that
moping conglomeration; a whole lot of puppies crushed and a whole lot of heavy faces.
It couldn’t have been worse. Because if there was one thing that bothered Jaysh
more than crowds, it was emotions. And here he had both! Not only was he
trapped on all sides by a crowd of gawking onlookers, but he was trapped on all
sides by a crowd of sad-faced onlookers, a whole living wall of
unhappiness as far as the eye could see, which was quite ways up here on the
Hill.
Thankfully, the collective eye of the
miserable-looking crew did not appear to be resting on him, but on a point
directly ahead of him, a point where Jaysh was steadily becoming aware of
someone speaking. He turned his head to face the disembodied voice and found a
man he knew. The very man, in fact, that had briefed him this morning on his
role in the services. At the time, the man hadn’t been wearing his officer’s
attire—feathery helmet and shoulder plates, olive-green pants with
complementary chain mail—but he had been sporting the medals.
Jaysh remembered staring at the medals
when he grew bored with staring at the man’s profuse lip hair. Lip hair that
was, once again, bouncing up and down as it spewed forth its message. And even
though Jaysh couldn’t hear every word of the message, and had only marginal
understanding of the words he could hear, he understood that this was the old
king’s eulogy.
If the disconsolate crowd of onlookers
hadn’t tipped him off, there was, of course, the long wooden crate in front of
the general and fresh mound of soil behind. The crate had been adorned with
precious jewels and bobbles and the soil had been covered with potted flowers
and decorative plants, but Jaysh could still see them. Just as he could see the
twelve-hands of empty space disappearing beneath the heavy box, held at bay by
two thin planks of wood jutting out to either side of the coffin.
Once Serit finished with his encouraging
speech about the old king’s life and once the mob of rueful people were escorted
from the Hill, the groundskeeper and his men would finish what they started
last night. They would slide the slats out from under the coffin, drop the
coffin in the hole, and then fill the hole with dirt.
Guess it’s like goin’ to the outhouse,
Jaysh thought as he studied the carefully piled soil. Guess some things yeh
just doan’ do in public.
But if that were true, then
someone must have forgotten to tell General Branmore, because he was over there
talking about the hole and the soil, telling everyone about the brief
and special journey from the cradle to grave. At the moment, he was detouring
from this special journey to discuss the properties of the Raya Amulet—detailing
how it had been extinguished and reignited for the past hundred generations—but
there had been parts about the grave in there as well.
Jaysh heard him say, “As old kings wither and new kings rise, the
light of the Raya blinks on and off above them, twinkling like a distant purple
star in the eternal dark of night.” Listening to this, Jaysh didn’t know
what to make of that horrible bit of verbiage, aside from the fact that it had
painted a disturbing picture on the window of his mind, one he wished to smash
with a hammer and never see again.
The image was of a line of men walking
through the Sway, a line of old men waddling from left to right and
gradually disappearing over the hills to the east. It was nighttime, he
noticed, and the prairie was black. But as is the case in most dreams—those
during the day as well as at night—he could see the men clearly, their hunched
frames, their long gowns, the heavy stupid crowns poised on their heads.
He could also see the light above the
kings, the one hovering about treetop-height instead of resting parallel with
the moon, a tiny purple pinprick in the ever-present gloom. There were
additional stars dotting the universe above—muted flecks of white resting at
the normal altitude for a celestial body—but it was the red-blue of the
lower star that held the woodsman attention. He watched it blinking on and off
in the night sky of forever, watched it counting the seemingly endless supply
of old men passing along below.
Jaysh shook his head at the image, willing
it from his mind and nearly falling over in the process, the residual effect of
having not slept or eaten since Serit collected him in the Shun. In the
end, though, the near fall had been a small price to pay for scraping the image
from his mental canvas. In fact, had the awful image persisted, he was
half-tempted to land face-first on a grave marker and open a fissure in his
skull. At the site of the grave, though, the historian-slash-general was moving
on to his next touching analogy and Jaysh was spared the pain of altering his
frontal lobe. Or so he thought.
The
general reached towards one of his retainers and retrieved a very thick and
leather-bound tome, the sort that might have elicited a soft groan of despair
from his audience had the occasion not been so somber. But somber or not, the
woodsman’s shoulders slumped a little as he watched Serit wrestling with the
book.
We’re gona be here til harvest, he
thought.
But as it turned out, the general fumbled
with the many bookmarks sprouting from its pages, opened it to the chapters in
the back, and read only a brief passage from the tome.
To every thing there is a season,
he read, a time to every purpose under Glory…a time to mourn…and a time to
rejoice.
Jaysh stood there stunned. The passage had
been read and not only was it brief, but he had no desire to crack open his
brainpan. For that matter, he found himself nodding in agreement with the brief
narrative, finding that it appealed to him a lot more than the imagery
of the purple Raya blinking in the night sky. What was more, it seemed like
he’d heard those words before, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember
where. Serit had prefaced the passage by referring to some famous prophet out
of some holy text, but Jaysh had always been horrible with names and places.
He was good with faces, even better with
things, but tell him a person’s name and it was like the words passed right
through him. If he had to guess, he’d have said the passage came from the old
fellow whose bearded mug had been chiseled on the four temples of the city. Jaysh
couldn’t remember setting foot in those places—even back in the days when
they’d been open—but it seemed like the old fellow’s name was L’bontus or F’tonkus
or something like that.
Regardless of where Jaysh had heard the
passage or who had spoken it, the passage itself had worked its magic and Jaysh
had come away with a greater understanding of the Raya’s purpose. It was almost
like a mental Raya had lit up inside his head and illuminated the truth.
The stone was not a thing of evil, but a thing of wonder, just like the inner
workings of the heart were a thing of wonder, which—unless he was sorely
mistaken—was what Serit was saying. The stone was not a timepiece for measuring
the king’s life, but an emotional beacon for queuing the people of Jashandar,
fading for them to mourn, rekindling for them to cheer.
No problem, then, Jaysh thought,
relief bubbling from his core. We hang that there rock out one’a the
winduhs, let folk know what’s what with their feelin’s, an’ everythin’s right
as rain an’ fine as pai—
Serit stopped talking and silence rolled
out of the prairie. The woodsman snapped out his thoughts and fixed his eyes on
the speaker, finding that the speaker’s sleepy gaze appeared to be directed at
him. Jaysh stopped chewing
and looked hurriedly to his right and left, feeling certain the old historian
was staring at one of the many people crowded to either side of him. But the
people to either side, Jaysh was disconcerted to find, were also staring
at him. In fact, it appeared as though everyone on the Hill was staring at him,
every bug-eyed, desperate-looking, sad-sack. It was almost like he was supposed
to be doing something, but that just couldn’t be.
When Serit had met with him this morning,
he never said one banning thing about the woodsman participating in the
ceremony. Jaysh would accompany Reets and Gariel to the Hill and then he would
listen to the eulogy like everyone else. There had been no mention of
additional duties or responsibilities. He was just supposed to show up like he
had the previous night when Serit and Iman had found him in the…
Jaysh’s eyes shot back to the general, the
man whose eyes were suddenly preoccupied with the pile of dirt. Had that old
coot done it again? Had the filthy liar tricked him into another mess like he
had the night before? Jaysh made another nervous scan of the ever-staring mob—kids
on headstones, women on fence posts, men peaking around shoulders—and thought
that he had.
Behind him, something like a wooden peg
poked Jaysh in the love-handles and he looked down in time to see the gnarled
finger prod him a second time. He followed the offensive finger to its owner
and found the halfling nodding adamantly towards the casket.
Jaysh shook his head at the disfigured
man, wondering what in the Pit he could be pointing at. Well, he knew what
he was pointing at. He just didn’t know why the adviser felt compelled
to involve him. Jaysh had already seen the old king laying in his smooth
mahogany box, arms carefully folded, legs pulled straight, face doctored and
painted so that he didn’t look near as ghastly as he had the night before. But again,
what did that have to do with him? There didn’t appear to be anything left to
do except lower the man down and cover him up, and the last Jaysh checked they
had a whole platoon of laborer for that nasty little chore.
“G’on, now,” Reets whispered, giving him
another rabbit punch to the side. “G’on an’ take it.”
Jaysh shifted Zeph to the side and turned
so Reets could see his face, convinced the twisted little man had somehow
missed the furrows on his brow or the set of his jaw. The twisted little man,
however, paid the look no mind and gave him another not-so-gentle nudge,
shooing him towards the coffin.
Guts churning with dismay, Jaysh turned
and surveyed the contents of the casket one more time, checking to see if
something had materialized from thin air while he’d been staring at the
halfling. As he suspected, everything was the same. It was still just the old
king lying flat on his back, shiny black robes spread across his body, stunning
white lilies lining both sides of the box, dazzling ruby rings sparkling from
his fingers.
Beside him, Reets said, “Son, we ain’t goin’ nowheres ‘til yeh fetch
it out, so yeh best get over there an’ start a-fetchin, jus like Serit
tol’ yeh.”
Jaysh made another look to the general—who
was still scrutinizing the many clods of dirt piled behind the coffin—and said,
“Wha’d he tell me?”
“Wha’d he—” Reets’ voice caught in
his throat and, although Jaysh didn’t look down, the ill-tempered halfling must
have been consulting the advisers to either side because, shortly thereafter, a
new voice emerged by Jaysh’s ear.
“Jaysh dear, you have to retrieve the Raya
Amulet from your father.” The voice belonged to Mums, her rich and creamy tones
unmistakable in the silence. “It is not bound behind his neck, so you need only
reach in and lift it from his—”
And after that, Jaysh remembered only the
yelps of surprise from the advisers and the gasps of alarm from the crowd as he
bolted for the archway, bodies bouncing to either side, tombstone ricocheting
off his shins, hands and fingers tearing at his clothes.
Eventually, one set of fingers yanked so
hard that Zeph dropped from of his grasp. Jaysh screamed her name and scrambled
down for her, but it was too late. She’d no sooner hit the ground and she was
gone, vanishing in the crowd like a bolt of black lightening. And even had he
seen which direction she’d gone, he wouldn’t have been able to pursue her, not
with the various sets of muscled hands gripping him by the arms and dragging
him towards the grave.
One of the draggers—someone who sounded a
lot like Mums, though it was difficult to tell over the general murmur of disapproval—said,
“Jaysh dear, relax. You have to relax for me, okay? Can you do that?
I’ll get the stone, but you have to calm down.”
Then a sea of faces was swimming before
him and he thought he saw everyone he’d ever know passing before his eyes—Iman’s
long black locks and clean-shaven stare, Gariel’s pointed orange hair and
burning look of fury, Brine’s silly-looking braid and ridiculous expression of
shock—but as quickly as he’d seen them, they had vanished back inside the
crowd.
“Hold him. Hold him steady,” the titan’s
voice called, followed shortly by a flash of black ribbon to either side of
Jaysh’s face and the feel of silky straps sliding around his ears and pressing
against his neck. Someone was tying them behind his head—someone with a pair of
shaggy hands that most definitely belong to a titan—and then the space below
his beard began to glow, the color of lilacs smoldering in a field, the force
of the sun festering behind the mountains.
Something like a lead nut thumped against
his chest and Jaysh tilted his head forward. His arms and legs were still held
firmly in check, but his head remained free and unrestrained and it was with no
effort at all that he lowered it to the stone at his collar and watched the
light leaking from its core.
Lightheadedness overcame him and suddenly
he felt as weak as an infant, like he used to feel when he was a boy and had
bitten off too much vine, his body sagging in the sturdy arms of his captors,
his knees buckling, his head lolling.
Around him, the air rang with startled
cries, but as the darkness slowly took him, he remembered peering down at the
same dull light that had bathed the face of the old king and thinking to
himself, This is it. This is the end’a everythin. No more Fish Day, no more
Hunt day, no more Scout or Hike Day. It’s all over with, all the floatin
through the water, all the sleepin on the Hill, all the nappin by the river…
And then he knew nothing.
